A Simple Way to Get Smarter
Did you know that while you sleep, your brain processes the day’s information? It combs through recently formed memories, stabilizing, copying, filing, and making them more useful for the next day.
A night of sleep can make memories resistant to interference from other information and allow you to recall them more effectively. It also lets your brain sift through newly formed memories, possibly even identifying what is worth keeping and what to let go of. Sometimes you can even do this forcefully while you’re awake. I heard it’s called selective amnesia, when you have bad experiences or memories and you just want to force yourself to forget them.
It’s been discovered that you need a minimum of six hours of sleep to see an improvement in your performance over the 24 hours following a learning session.
An article I read stated that "during sleep, your brain reactivates the patterns of neural activity that it performed during the day, strengthening your memories by long-term potentiation."
As this unconscious rehearsing strengthens memory, something more complex is happening as well—your brain may be selectively rehearsing the more difficult aspects of a task. It seems your brain needs time to process or “rehearse” new information, connecting the dots, so to speak—and sleep provides the maximum benefit.
As exciting new findings about sleep come in more and more rapidly, it becomes more and more clear that your brain is anything but inactive during sleep.
That article also mention that "it is now clear that sleep can consolidate memories by enhancing and stabilizing them, and by finding patterns within studied material even when you don’t know that patterns might be there. It’s also clear that skimping on sleep can interfere with crucial cognitive processes. Miss a night of sleep, and the day’s memories might be compromised."
So get at least six hours of sleep a day.. Something that hasn’t happened to me in about a week now.
